Monthly Archives: March 2013

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A website is a website is a website, except when it’s a restaurant’s website. There’s something extra tricky about restaurant websites — they have to be cool, branded, creative, but also simple and clean. And the best ones capture all relevant information in just a few pages. There’s no need for deep websites with tons of clicks and pages.

At WittyCookie, we stare at restaurant websites all day. And when we’re not staring, we’re working with clients to help improve and refine their sites to maximize traffic and online orders. While there’s no doubt restaurant sites are complex beasts, our marketing team has assembled some proven best practices.

Homepage:
Your website is only as good as your homepage, period. It’s just like when people judge a book by its cover, but worse because it costs you customers.

Photos: Beautiful, enticing, high quality photography goes a long way. If you don’t have professional photography already, find a friend with a nice camera and a good eye and stage a shoot of your most delicious looking plates. It’ll pay off in dividends.

Above the fold: Make sure the action/most important information is happening in the top half of the screen. People are lazy and don’t like to scroll.

Navigation menu: Getting around your site should be intuitive. Pages should have generic/industry wide titles like: menu, order online, about us, reservations, contact. Example: Marcello’s Pizza and Pasta.

Ask for emails: Customer emails are like gold for a restaurant owner. Create a field for customers to “stay in touch” by entering their contact information. Example: Dragonfly Mandarin.

Location: Make your address clear on the homepage, and as a footer on all pages. Link to a Google Map so directions are easy and highlight any special instructions like where to park or valet. Example: Coral Tree Cafe.

Hours: State your hours clearly. If you’re open every day for all meal times, this is less important. But if you’re closed every Wednesday, avoid an angry customer and tell them before they make the trip. Update for holidays too!

Reservations:
Chances are a decent percent of your web traffic comes from people who want to know about your reservations policy. Give them answers — and fast:

Reserving options: We advise our clients that if they choose to take reservations, give at least one other option besides a phone call. That could mean using an online service like Urbanspoon or accepting emailed requests.

No reservations: If you decide you don’t want to take reservations, that’s cool, but make it abundantly clear.

Menu:
All the restaurant owners we work with spend days, months, even years refining the content, flow, language and look of their hard copy menus — then we lose them in the transition to digital!

HTML: HTML menus are by far the best option, First, HTML menus are searchable, meaning that Google recognizes the words in the content, and pushes your website toward the top in organic searches. HTML menus are also mobile friendly.

Flash: There’s been a trend over the past decade to build Flash (Adobe) sites. Don’t do it! They’re annoying for customers since they load slowly or incompletely and since they’re like giant photos, none of the content on these sites is indexed by search engines.

Online ordering: Online ordering takes a static menu and turns it into a dynamic marketplace for your most engaged customers (those visiting your website). At ChowNow we harness the power of the three most effective channels for online orders: restaurant websites, Facebook and mobile apps. Example: Grey Block Pizza.

Promotions: If you have the same promotions each week, post the calendar and highlight each night’s specials.

Story:
Think of your website as one giant story — are you trying to convey a casual, laid back, cozy story or a loud rock and roll, drink beer out of the bottle type feel?

Chef/management: People love knowing a bit about who’s preparing their meal. Tell the story of how the restaurant came to be, where the chef went to culinary school, where the idea for the name came from — anything memorable and authentic. Example: Zelda’s Corner.

Farmers/ingredients: If you spring on seasonal, local or organic ingredients, your website is a great place to promote these special ingredients. Provide a brief description and a link to the farmer/purveyors website.

Social media:
Stay in touch with your customers by providing news and photos on a regular basis.

Blog: Have you considered starting one, or have you already? Blogs are a great way to engage with customers, give your SEO a boost and share news. Example: Ocho Mexican Grill.

Facebook/Twitter: Use the Facebook “like button” and Twitter icon to link to your social media pages so you can stay in touch with your website visitors long term.

Press: Create a page to house all your press hits. Include links to all online articles, logos of the publication and pull out quotes of the most complimentary content. Example: Huckleberry Cafe.

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WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

In 1997, there were approximately 1 million websites, and 10 years later, there were 150 million. In 2007, there were about 1 million mobile websites, and the number is supposed to reach 150 million by 2017. It is clear that mobile friendly websites are going to increase exponentially in the years to come. The internet started on the PC but with more than 3 billion mobile phones being used world wide, we are soon approaching a time when many people’s first internet experience will be through a mobile device. These rapid changes have left the business world with no choice other than to adapt to them. With mobile devices taking over the place of the PC, not having a mobile friendly website is like committing business suicide.

People want information and services, and they want them fast. With the advancement in technology, it is possible for you to access this information and the services through your cell phones. Those companies that have not yet adapted to mobile may miss this opportunity to attract customers. It has become very important for companies to be able to cater to their customers over mobile phones. A mobile is the most personal form of communication and is becoming a powerful one as well. If you can capture a customer on their mobile, then you have them on all other platforms as well.

Why You Should Have a Mobile Friendly Site

Rise of the smart phones: Smartphones have become affordable over the past few years. Almost everyone is looking to buy one. These devices are excellent for hand held browsing. Since the sale of smart phones is increasing, it only makes sense for companies to have a site that can be easily browsed through on these devices.

Popularity of mobile internet: According to studies, about 40% of the people who have a mobile phone use it for going online, and half of them will go online at least once every day. This presents a huge opportunity for a business.

Inexpensive option: Because mobile screens are a lot different from computer screens, the site design has to change accordingly. It is a relatively cheap process and not very time consuming either.

Use of GPS: GPS is a very useful technology. It is used by many mobile users to find out necessary things or directions. They also use it to find nearby services or businesses. If there is no mobile site available for your business then you are potentially losing a customer right in your own area.

Don’t get beaten by competition: People love to browse while traveling. However, when they find that sites that they normally used at their PCs are not mobile compatible, they might end up switching to a site which provides similar services and is mobile compatible as well.

SEO: Having a mobile friendly website also helps in SEO as it helps improve rankings on mobile friendly search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

Compatible with all platforms, unlike mobile apps: The alternative to mobile friendly site is producing apps that perform similar functions. Now this can be a very tedious task. Making an app is also quite expensive and apart from that, you would have to make different apps for different platforms. Once you make these apps, they have to fight hundreds of thousands of other apps to get into the spotlight.

2D Bar codes: One great bonus that comes along with mobile friendly websites is the 2D bar code. These appear like regular bar codes, but are capable of so much more. They can be used for discounts. A customer takes a picture of the code with their cell phone and instantly has access to not only the details, but also reviews of the product before they buy it.

Better user experience: Earlier, it might not have been possible to make a mobile site and give the user a good enough experience because of the low bandwidth and server speeds. However, in recent times, this has changed and you can be assured that using a good mobile site will be an enriching experience for a user.

Within a span of three years, the number of people accessing the internet via mobile will be more than those accessing it via a PC. This, more than anything else, should be a clear indication for you to start working on the mobile version of your site. Apart from that, the biggest draw on the internet today are social networking websites. Many people access these websites through there mobile devices. If they come across a link to your site, they would want to view it on their mobile screens.

Things to Keep in Mind

There are numerous reasons for you to have a mobile version of your site. Mobiles are the device of choice for many people today, and you would want to be accessible to them. However, while making mobile sites, you need to keep certain things in mind. People use mobiles for browsing because they want to save time. If a site takes too long to load, then there is no point of a mobile user visiting that site. You need to keep the page size small enough so it is loaded quickly on cellular networks.

Often the problem of text size also crops up. It is not a good idea to cram the most information you can in one page. Mobile screens are small and it becomes difficult to read a lot of text. Also clicking on links becomes a difficult task. Make sure that the content of your page can be viewed easily and the site can be navigated easily as well.

If you are not someone who is surfing the net from your mobile, then you will soon be in minority. In the near future, most people will be using a mobile phone for browsing. This means that any business that has a presence on the internet right now should make appropriate changes so that its website is mobile friendly.

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WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

Unlike your shop front, office or warehouse, your website remains conveniently open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and allows you to reach local, interstate and international clients. A good website also enables your small business to compete on the same footing as much bigger organisations; and it helps shape customer perceptions of your business.

Why is a good website so important?

A good website can be a powerful, dynamic resource for a small business, giving you an online presence that can be seen by millions of potential customers.

The benefits of having a website will vary depending on the nature of your business, and the extent to which you choose to utilise available technologies. A website can help grow your business through:

1. Improving your brand reputation – The look and feel of your website and a good or satisfying user’s experience can help instil a level of trust in your business with customers and prospects and establish you as credible and professional. The internet also offers the opportunity for a small business to portray itself as or comparable to a big business and thereby compete on a more level playing field.

2. Cost effective marketing and promotions – A website enables you to promote your business more cost effectively and in a more sustainable long term way than through more traditional offline methods. You have ability to update add to and change your content with minimal additional cost, reach a wide audience, capture and build a database of leads, conduct market research and generate interest through hosting competitions and promotions.

3. Market expansion – A website can be accessed anywhere, any time. This means a vast number of potential customers can find and reach you, even on a global scale, without overhead costs and infrastructure needed to set up a bricks and mortar presence in those markets.

4. Selling while you sleep – Because the internet never turns off, your website enables you to increase your hours of operation.

5. Add value and satisfaction – You can use your website to provide additional value to customers by offering them product information, tips, advice and general interest content that can inform and entertain.

6. Reduce cost of sale and processing – Many of the overheads associated with making sales to customers face to face can be reduced when selling online giving favourable economies of scale.

What works? Desirable website attributes

Site visitors on average will only spend a few seconds on your site before deciding whether or not to move on. This is why it is important to know and follow best practices for website design and to know what customers consider as desirable attributes in terms of content, functionality and interactivity.

Note: some of these factors will be universal in nature and some may be very specific to the industry in which you operate. You need to know about and address both.

Much research has been conducted into what users want from a website. If you have the time you can delve in detail into many aspects of design and content such as the optimal font size to use and the order and placement of various items and functionality. Below is a summary of the most common findings from the many studies on this topic:

1. Personalization – this is when a website treats each visitor as an individual, recognises visitors when they revisit and delivers information based on the visitor’s preferences (this is done technically through user registration and login, cookies, customisation of dashboards, etc). Personalisation enables greater targeting of information, increases relevance and enhances the user experience.

2. Interactivity – empowers users with the ability to determine what, how, when and why they consume content as well as the ability to create their own content. Interactivity not only enhances the user experience, but also encourages users to contribute to your brand, forging stronger and more loyal relationships. Some studies show that the higher the degree of interactivity, the higher the website’s attractiveness and that the level of interactivity can be important when trying to convert site visitors from “lookers” to “buyers”.

3. Informativeness – this refers to the degree of useful the information provided is perceived by the user. Is it what they were looking for? Is it easy to understand? Does it address their question of “what’s in it for me”? In other words, how your offering will benefit them.

Increasing the usefulness and relevance of site content can be done simply through providing product /services support information, contact details, regularly refreshing content, removing expired information, including relevant keywords so user can quickly determine the relevance to their search and a clear ‘call to action’ so the customer understands what the next steps are.

4. Navigation – refers to how easily users can find what they are looking for. Generally speaking, the more complex and difficult a site is to navigate, the lower the user’s attitude towards the site.

5. Privacy and security – this relates to how customer and transaction data is collected, processed and used. Ideally, websites should provide security and privacy statements, secure payment gateways and have full disclosure statements for warranty, returns policy and liabilities.

6. Entertainment – many researchers have suggested that the effectiveness of a website can depend on how well it engages the attention of visitors by being fun, exciting, enjoyable or entertaining. This can also encourage visitors to continuously return to the site and spend longer exploring the rest of the site.

7. Accessibility – is the ease by which visitors can reach the site. Factors such as poor download speeds and long lag time can be a source of irritation for users, which then may also reflect negatively on your brand and offering.

– – –

WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

It isn’t all it takes, but these five essentials will help you build a solid base and become one of the small businesses that succeeds.

Leading a small business can be more stressful than raising children or maintaining a healthy relationship with your spouse. Here are some basic principles to get you started on a sane journey toward growth.

When John Mackey and his then-girlfriend Renee Lawson opened a vegetarian food store in their Austin, Texas home 34 years ago, nobody–including the couple themselves–would have dubbed him an entrepreneur. Today, a clean-shaven Mackey is most likely unrecognizable to patrons of the bearded college dropout’s first shop. He built his venture into the $15.5 billion Whole Foods empire, with more than 300 supermarkets that boast organic and grass-fed meats along with an array of vegetarian fare.

Few will ever rise to the ranks of Mackey, who made the cut for Fortune’s 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time. Mackey created a repeatable process of selling high quality natural and organic products in communities with the right appetite for a brand that relies on customer affinity. It takes a combination of understanding market demand and market size and having repeatable processes to support that market to have a scalable business. And Mackey had to strive to sustain innovation in a world where even Walmart peddles organic foods.

So many business founders come up with a good idea, yet they are unable to scale their companies for growth. Through my own journey as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned that every business is unique, but there are certain key precepts to follow for success. The few that do succeed do so with unmatched focus, discipline, and unconventional thinking.

Although it takes more than just this to be a success in business, here are five essential principles that you can begin implementing right away as you begin your journey toward growing your business:

1. Timing is everything.The timing of your product or service must be right in the marketplace. Mackey bit on the organic and natural food revolution just as the public’s palate for these products oozed into the mainstream, but if the market isn’t ready and you are way ahead of the market, then you must possess the drive and the willingness to sacrifice in order to make that product or service work.

You will need to choose to either wait for the market to catch up (requiring the resources to survive during that period, and accepting the risk of emerging competition), or you’ll need to adjust your offering to something more palatable to the market’s current readiness.

Smaller businesses have the advantage of being able to make choices and implement changes without the exhaustive process and conflicting points of view that slow down major corporations. You need to anticipate your market and customers’ needs and constantly innovate to stay ahead. This requires leadership with agility, resilience, and a willingness to fail–and to recognize that failure quickly enough to adapt and move forward.

2. Brand, brand, brand.Today’s economy requires business leaders to create positive memories for customers and partners, like Mackey has, or customers will turn to a competitor in search of a better experience. Whole Foods shoppers are loyal and believe they are embracing a healthy and socially conscious lifestyle by shopping at the stores. If you want to create a scalable business, you have to understand just how crucial it is to build brand equity. The emotional attachment that links customers to your product, as opposed to any other, translates into sustainable growth.

Here are some basic rules to connect, shape, influence, and lead with your brand:

Choose your target audience. The surest road to product failure is to try to be all things to all people.

Connect with the public. Your objective is to make your audience feel an emotional attachment to your brand. Be sure to have a stunning website.

Inspire and influence your audience. An inspirational brand message is far more influential than one that just highlights product feature functions.

Reinforce the brand image within your company. Make sure employees at every level of your organization work and behave in a way that reinforces your brand image.

3. Scale your sales.Creating a unique product and a unique brand isn’t enough. It takes repeatable sales processes to create a scalable business. It is one thing to sign up a few customers; it is another thing entirely to identify, design, and implement repeatable sales and customer delivery processes. You’ve created a repeatable and scalable sales model when:

You can add new hires at the same productivity level as yourself or your sales leader.

You can increase the sources of your customer leads on a consistent basis.

Your sales conversion rate and revenue can be consistently forecasted.

Your cost to acquire a new customer is significantly less than the amount you can earn from that customer over time.

Your customers get the right product in the right place at the right time.

A repeatable sales model builds the platform to scale. Like the search for product/market fit, it can take major experimentation/R&D to find a repeatable and scalable sales model.

4. Embrace technology.Nearly two thirds, or 64%, of the recent Bank of America (BofA) Small Business Owner Survey respondents said they wish they took better advantage of technology innovations to help manage their business. If a small business can identify a genuine need, technology likely exists to fulfill that need both locally and globally. There are few barriers to entry in an age where anyone with wireless can cheaply and quickly access the enabling technologies needed to execute their business model. It comes down to creating the right operating blueprint that connects the dots between your business model and the application of accessible technologies.

5. De-stress for success.Most small business owners consider managing the ongoing success of their business to be twice as stressful as maintaining a healthy relationship with a spouse or partner, nearly three times as stressful as raising children, and more than four times as stressful as managing their own personal finances, according to the same Bank of America report mentioned earlier. The survey indicates that small business owners routinely forgo physical fitness and other personal priorities to keep up with business demands. Thirty-eight percent of small business owners maintain full or part-time jobs while running their own business.

The stressors can be relentless. But if you’re not happy, healthy, and motivated, you can’t create a business model that provides a positive market experience. You also set the tone for everyone who works with you. Nobody wants to do business with a grouchy, bitter, and exhausted owner. Therefore, investing the time and effort to adequately take care of your physical and mental well-being will further increase your chances for long-term success. Mental health is not just about going to the gym to let off steam. It’s about achieving a state of mental calmness to see you though the relentless challenges–but that’s another topic in itself!

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WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

Banner ads and print ads can be expensive. And they are not necessarily the best way to advertise your small or mid-size business. So to find how to get the greatest return on your advertising investment, Small Business Computing surveyed small business owners. Below are 10 of their top suggestions for how to advertise on a budget.

“AdWords and PPC [pay-per-click] can give you crazy amounts of traffic if you are tight with your campaign and run niche ad groups,” explained Andrew Riker an SEO specialist at WordStream. “Focused, long-tail keywords that are specific to your industry will cause the highest possible click-through rate and in-turn conversions.”

Riker adds that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a lot of traffic. “A small daily budget — $10-$20/day — can provide you with a large amount of traffic and in turn qualified leads, as long as the ad is relevant,” he said.

“We tried print ads and banner ads, but for our money Facebook ads provide us with the most focused consumers,” explained Chris Knollmeyer, Web manager for Carolina Rustica. “Being able to target specific demographics lets us pinpoint people we have not reached yet and provides us with a platform to reach out to them. This kind of targeting allows us to minimize extemporaneous clicks from consumers [who are] just browsing or searching for information and gets us the most for our money.”

“Facebook ads have definitely been the most successful overall,” concurred Megan LaBant Abrahamsen, the owner of Blue Star Bazaar. “I can set a small budget (less than $10 per day) and target specific customers – [by] age, gender, education and interests similar to my product categories.”

Even if people don’t immediately make a purchase because of the Facebook ad, many of them wind up “liking” her business, she said, which lets Blue Star Bazaar create a database of potential customers.

“One of the best ways to advertise and get traffic to your website is by using StumbleUpon ads [StumbleUpon Paid Discovery],” noted Chris Wise, the online marketing director at CustomerRave. “They cost as little as $0.05 a click, so for $5 you can get 100 unique visitors to your site. While the bounce rate is more often than not higher when using these ads, it’s a great way to advertise contests, giveaways and big promotions,” he said.

And if the content you are promoting proves to be popular and receives a lot of “likes,” you will start receiving free traffic from Stumbles, which can go on for months, even after you have stopped advertising.

“In exchange for the content, they allow you to include a couple of back links to your website. Not only does this provide you with potential traffic and leads to your business, it also helps establish you as an expert in your related field,” said Kostanecki. Can’t come up with a subject to write about? He suggests asking your customers about their biggest pains and problems.

5. Donate Products or Volunteer Services to a Worthy Cause

“I got the equivalent of $1,000 in advertising by building the website for the Rhode Island Rally for Recovery,” explained Benjamin John Coleman, founder of The Origami Bonsai Company. And his investment of time really paid off — resulting in $5,000 in new business. That’s because when other vendors who participated in the Rally saw what a great job his company did building and maintaining the Rally website, they hired Coleman to help them with their websites.

6. Cultivate Bloggers

“Find influential bloggers in your industry and ask them to review your product or service,” suggested Daniel Weaver, the president and owner of Daniel’sPromise. “Many will be happy to do so if you give them free product for them to use.”

That’s what Juppy, the maker of the Juppy Baby Walker, did. “When we started out, our company we didn’t have a lot of cash on hand to spend on advertising,” explained Mayra Sotelo, the COO for Juppy. “So we decided to seek out mom bloggers who would review The Juppy Baby Walker. This worked out great for us…because there is no better [endorsement of] our baby walker that fits in a purse than by a real mom who loves our product.”

And if you can’t find a blogger who will review and write about your product for free, there are also bloggers “who will write about your site/product/company in exchange for a fee,” noted Mike Scanlin, CEO of Born To Sell. And even with a fee, that kind of endorsement is typically more effective and less expensive than a banner ad.

7. Claim Local Listings on Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local

“You’d be amazed at how many small businesses forget to sign up for services like Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local even though it’s free!” explained Mandy Boyle, the SEO manager for Solid Cactus. “Claim your local listing, fill out the information and take advantage of people searching for businesses in your area,” she advised.

8. Use Community Sites and Local Directories

“Community-based online networks [such as Thumbtack and Quentin’s Friends] are a great way to cost-effectively get the word out about your business to a more targeted group,” explained Dana Leavy, CEO ofAspyre Solutions.

Leavy uses a site called Quentin’s Friends, an invitation-only network where members can post recommendations and offers for their products and services for a very small fee ($15). “The service is location-specific, so my ad is going out to thousands of people who are specifically in my geographic area, New York,” she said. And Leavy’s return on investment has been an impressive 6,500 percent.

If you own a B2B company, a good way to reach your target audience is through LinkedIn advertising, “We are a small business and our target market is small business users,” explained Damian Raffele, vice president, marketing, AnyMeeting.

LinkedIn Ads has worked well for the company, because it allows them to target a specific audience by geography, demographics, job title or LinkedIn Group. “Being able to target users who belong to specific LinkedIn Groups… allows us to design ad copy that is tailored for them, which has resulted in great conversion rates, providing us with a great ROI on our marketing spend.”

10. Distribute Flyers

“If you have a small business that focuses on a particular area, flyers are a great way to advertise,” said Nathan Letourneau, co-founder of CampusBooks4Less. And they needn’t be expensive. Chances are you have someone in your company, or a friend or family member, who can help you design the flyer inexpensively (or for free) – and you can print the flyer in house or find an inexpensive printer.

As for distribution, “hire some high school or college students and have them put the flyers on parked cars, attach them to house entry doors and distribute them inside area businesses (to employees and on any bulletin boards, if allowed) and apartment complexes,” he advised. “We saw huge increases in traffic after having students distribute flyers on parked cars in our target areas.”

While not every method will work for every business, each advertising strategy is inexpensive enough that you should be able try a few to find out what works for you. Also, many of the sites mentioned, such as Google AdWords and Facebook, periodically offer advertising credits or discounts, which small business owners should use to their advantage.

– – –

WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

It’s easy to spot a beautiful portfolio. Designers know that looks sell, and many people sell themselves that way. Of course, the ability to make something that looks good matters, especially for visual designers. But the challenge is that great images say nothing about what it will be like to work with someone, or whether they’ll be consistently able to produce good work.

Hiring a designer is a challenge. As a founder without firsthand design experience, it’s hard to know what skills to value and how to judge a candidate. You likely have experience reading résumés and interviewing candidates, but how should you judge a design portfolio?

It’s possible to look past the pretty imagery — you just need to balance first impressions with a bit of rigor and analysis. A portfolio isn’t a collection of pictures. (Writers have entire portfolios without a single image.) A portfolio is just a collection of past work. And it’s a great complement to a résumé because it shows you the actual work instead of just listing responsibilities and top-line accomplishments.

Actually, start with the résumé

Before I look at the portfolio, I usually look at the résumé to establish some baseline expectations:

How many years of experience do they have?

Any formal design education?

Any companies or agencies I’d recognize?

How are they positioning themselves? (Interaction designer, visual designer, etc.)

Any job titles or responsibilities that seem overstated?

Based on the résumé, I’ll look at the portfolio to challenge possible biases, look for clues to questions I now have, and get a more nuanced picture of what type of designer this person might be.

Then I dive in. After seeing a couple hundred portfolios, there’s a set of questions I ask myself. Some are about the portfolio generally, and the rest are about the work.

Look at the portfolio design itself

Did they treat this like a design problem? Too often, designers don’t think about their portfolio as the solution to a design problem. Let’s phrase it as one: create an experience giving the person screening you enough insight into your unique set of experience, skills, and approaches that he or she feels reasonably confident that interviewing you won’t be a waste of time.

Did they build it themselves? Yeah, building it yourself gets you more credibility, but only if it’s well-designed. An interaction designer might suffer here by putting their lackluster visual chops to work, though there’s more room for building thoughtful interactions. Portfolio sites — CargoCollective, Behance, any number of WordPress templates — tend to only emphasize images, and even a visual designer should have a good story to tell.

What’s the navigation like? If it’s custom, are they communicating that they understand the nuances of portfolio browsing? Whenever I drill down on one piece, I look to see if I can move to another piece directly, and whether they’re placing that navigation in a thoughtful location, such as the end of a long page. If you’re using modal lightboxes, have you tried to make the image bigger and the navigation better than the defaults? If they’re grouping work, is it by theme, by job, or arbitrary?

Look at each piece of work

Did they communicate their understanding of the problem they were solving? Very few people do this, and it sucks. It sends the message that they were either lazy, not user-centered (where the “user” is the person looking at the portfolio), or that they value the wrong things about design: making pretty things and not solving problems through clear communication.

Did they understand if and why their solution was successful?Success can be defined a number of ways: meeting the goals originally laid out, improving on a key metric, recognition by the press or users, etc. Can they be self-critical and assess the outcome of their work? Can they communicate what makes something effective?

What was their contribution as part of a bigger team? This is especially tough if it’s a bigger project where other designers played a similar role. It’s great to know how much collaborative work someone has done, and it’s even better to know that a person can gracefully share credit with their peers.

Generalize: What kind of designer is this?

There are a few portfolio stereotypes I tend to see. Does the design candidate fit into one of these categories? Which category best fits your company’s need?

Visual/UI designer: Likely the lowest word-to-pixel ratio of any designer, and the greatest use (and misuse) of trendy type, color, and visual effects. They can make your homepage hum and your buttons sparkle, but can they create a consistent and comprehensive brand and visual system?

New grad: The portfolio is heavy on student projects. Most often it’s an HCI Masters student, or possibly an industrial or graphic design undergrad. How much work in your domain have they actually done? Can you discern their contribution to group projects? If they have an HCI background, they may have better research skills than actual design chops.

Web designer: Comes off as a real all-arounder. They’ve most often worked at agencies or freelanced. Mentions their front-end skills and visual design skills, but might be bluffing on their UX chops. Have they tackled more challenging, stateful, and conditional interactions, or have they just built content sites?

Experienced UX designer: They’ll throw out big product or company names you recognize, and you may see inflated job titles. Hopefully they’ve tackled longer projects and more challenging feature sets. However, if they’ve been at big companies, they may have moved much more slowly. Either way, set your standards high, but be hopeful.

Making the decision: Should I interview this design candidate?

Think hard about what a designer is communicating — deliberately or not — based on what they’re showing you. What are they saying and how are they saying it? Their focus and delivery tells you a ton about what they value. Will that align with — or be a complement to — what you and your company value?

Who to hire depends on the specifics of your situation. Different products need different skills. It’s easy to go with the wrong set of skills, and easy to be swayed by the wrong things.

What if they don’t have a portfolio?

Lots of great designers don’t have portfolios, including some of the best ones I know. They’ve been working somewhere for a long time, or have great connections, or otherwise haven’t felt the need. Among web and software companies, portfolios weren’t used commonly as a screening tool until a couple of years ago. The portfolio was presented as part of the interview, but not as a requirement to get the meeting.

But times are changing. When I screened candidates at Google from 2004 to 2008, I didn’t expect portfolios. Now I see online portfolios frequently enough that I do. If I don’t see one, I feel comfortable asking for one, usually expecting a PDF. If they’re hesitant or too busy but it still seems promising, I usually ask for a quick screen-sharing session over Skype to walk me through a project or two. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than wasting time on multiple in-person meetings if you learn too late that the person is clearly not a match.

Some advice for designers

Stop selling sex. If you’re not showing how you think, all you’re selling is your good looks, and you’re setting the tone for the relationship between yourself and the rest of the team going forward. Pretend your portfolio is an online dating profile. What would it say if you looked at someone’s profile and all they had was a bunch of perfectly coiffed photos of themselves, with nothing written and little else — visual or verbal — to give you a better sense of personality?

Show that you’re a great thinker, not just a great Photoshopper. You are not a voice controlled mouse cursor for the client. Show that you can clearly frame a problem, establish goals for success, and explore solutions in a way that inspires confidence.

Vary how deep you go. Show a wide variety of work. Do a “case study” where you spend more time on problem framing and process work — everything that shows that you’ve got a great brain, not just good eyes and hands. Then mix it up with shorter project descriptions — something that piques my curiosity and leaves me wanting to hear more. Surprise me with a section that’s shallow but broad, say a collection of your best sketches.

Write about what’s unique. Don’t just say that you follow best practices: Personas, Contextual Inquiry, Card Sorting, blah blah. Everyone has that same list. Show me why your persona doc is better than any other, or why the way you capture behavioral states should be signed and framed. If your design solution is novel, tell me. If none of them are, that’s not so great, but then tell me why working with you is different. You are a unique snowflake, dammit, so hand me the magnifying glass.

Choosing who to hire is arguably the most important decision a startup makes. Given the high-risk nature of startups, the kind of collaborative work involved, and the small size of the team, the team you pick (and the team who picks you) has a huge impact on your success. Hiring is important at large companies, but at startups, it’s absolutely critical.

Designers have never been in more demand, so I feel conflicted about telling you to be more rigorous when looking at portfolios. But as demand rises, there’s always the risk of quality taking a dip. I want a generation of creative, thoughtful, disciplined designers making continually bigger contributions to startups, and your hiring choices will make that happen.

What have you learned in your time spent perusing portfolios? Anything you’ve seen more than once that makes you wonder, “why’d they do that?”

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WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

SEO can be challenging for small businesses. They must compete for the same market share against larger brands that often have more prestige, brand recognition, and consumer affinity.

That doesn’t mean that organic search is out of reach for small businesses as a powerful inbound marketing channel with high potential for return. In order to compete with large brands, small business owners must have an SEO strategy that offsets the often large difference in marketing budget. Because small businesses will not be able to outspend their larger counterparts on media acquisition, they must take a much more targeted and refined approach.

When it comes to short-tail SEO—general phrases with a high amount of search volume—the search engine results pages are dominated by big brands. There is little that a small business marketer with limited budget can do to change these results.

Despite various limitations, small businesses can gain meaningful search engine result real estate with a focus on areas of lowered competition. When geography is taken into account, there is often a much smaller big-brand presence in search results. That opens a window of opportunity for small businesses to gain useful organic search visibility.

Focusing on consumers looking for products and services in specific locales is a great way to limit the competition and give small businesses the ability to gain valuable real estate on search engine results pages. If the business also has an offline presence in a specific locale, there is even more opportunity in targeting these consumers. Consumers trust of a business they can visit in person, which will lead to higher conversion rates.

Geo-Modified Keyword Targeting

Part of the opportunity of location-based SEO for small businesses is to utilize geo-modified search queries. Better yet, in order to benefit from this method, the business does not necessarily have to be location-based. Geo-targeted search phrases are typically very low in competition and are often searched at the purchase stage of the buying cycle, which means they carry high-conversion rates.

Let’s use “home security” as an example. There are 22,200 Google searches for “home security” each month in the U.S.m according to Adwords. However, a small business typically would not have enough budget allocated to SEO to rank on page 1 for that query. When the geo-modifier “miami” is added to the query the monthly search volume drops to 210. This is still a decent amount of search volume and can certainly lead to home security sales.

The interesting part of this example comes when we look at competition. Examining the number of online pages that have each of these phrases in both the title tag of the page and the anchor text of an inbound link (this metric is known as In Anchor and Title) offers a picture of the relative competition for each phrase. This data can be pulled from MajesticSEO’sKeyword Checker tool.

The In Anchor and Title data show that the business will only be competing with approximately 51 other pages for the phrase “home security miami” as opposed to 248,328 competing pages for the more generic “home security.”

A business likely will not be able to rest on the 210 monthly searches for “home security miami.” This strategy, however, can be implemented at scale. Building geo-targeted content on the site for multiple geographic areas that the business can service provides the opportunity for several page 1 rankings within a specific budget.

Marketers should start by optimizing for the geographic areas that have the highest demand for the specific product or service that is being sold and working down from there. This can be identified by looking at the location report in Google Analytics to see where the majority of existing customers are coming from. You can also use keyword suggestion tools, such asGoogle’s Keyword Tool or Wordtracker, to see the search demand of various geo-modified phrases.

Local Search

If the small business has physical locations that consumers can visit, local search is an absolute must. Local search campaigns are ideal for capturing consumers searching on mobile devices because they can get directions and call the business with a simple click. There is no excuse for any local business to not have an optimized presence in local search engines, particularly within the major ones (Google +, Yahoo Local, Bing Local).

By creating and optimizing listings in local search engines, small business can get a great deal of search engine presence with a limited budget while increasing their rankings within aspecific region.

– – –

WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

I’m going to take a different approach to this post and use photography to illustrate some principles of design.

Understanding these fundamental concepts will help you grab your visitors attention and direct them to your intended conversion goal.

The most important element of any landing page is the conversion goal. Similarly, the most important aspect of your landing page design is to focus the visitor’s attention on that conversion area.

Make your visitors pay attention to your landing page!!!

Using Photography to Illustrate Visual Techniques

There are multiple ways to catch the attention of your visitors; you can use bold, catchy, funny or controversial copy or beautiful typographic design, you can have a video to allow a multimedia experience, and you can use some fundamental principles of design toguide the eyes of your customers with directional cues.

In this post I’ll break this into 2 main categories:

Suggestive Directional Cues: Abstract techniques that guide attention in a more subtle way.

Explicit Directional Cues: The use of arrows and real-world indicators familiar to our learned behaviour.

Some of these principles can be utilized by using photography directly, and for the rest, the illustrative powers of a photograph should be all you need to understand the concept.

TIP: Click the photos for a closeup…

Suggestive Directional Cues

1. WHITESPACE

In this example, the muted tones of the meadow drive your eye to the Pronghorn positioned in the corner.

Whitespace (or more correctly “blank space”) is an area of more or less nothing surrounding an area of importance. The reason I say blank space is that the color of the space isn’t important.

The purpose is to use simple spacial positioning to allow your Call To Action (CTA) to stand out from it’s surroundings and give your eye only one thing to focus on.

Landing page tip: Give your CTA or lead gen form some breathing room to allow it to stand out from the rest of your design.

2. COLOR

Color can be used to create an emotional response from your visitors. Orange for example is known to generate positive feelings and as such is a great choice for the color of your CTA. (You can also consider the positive affect of Green for go, and Blue as the classic click-me link colour).

The color here is so extreme that you can’t help but pay attention to it. This example also illustrates the contrast of color compared to the muted surrounding area.

Another important consideration is the contrasting effect of color. This idea borrows from the whitespace and contrast techniques described in points #1 and #3 in that it’s a method of “isolation via difference”.

In this first example, an “in your face” approach is used – the color is so overwhelming that you can’t help but stare at it – in this case often in disbelief as it’s a remarkable example of nature.

Position and color contrast are used here to move your eyetowards the grasshopper. The reason is that the entire shot is a single color except for the subject or interest.

Landing page tip: Use a single color (with a variety of tones) for your entire landing page – except for the CTA.

Make it jump off the page.

3. CONTRAST

I dare you to click on anything but the moon.

This is a fairly simple concept that applies across the color spectrum, but is most easily viewed in monochrome.

Landing page tip: The more you can make your Call To Action stand out from it’s surroundings the easier it will be to see. If you have a lot of black/grey text on a white background, then a black or white CTA won’t provide the desired contrast and you’d be better off with a colorful element. But if you have a very clean design without much detail or copy, a big black or white button can be dramatic.

Attention is focused on the primary element rising from the lake, and a secondary feature (the bush) due to the contrast with their surroundings.

This is a more subtle example that shows how contrast can be used to highlight one or two key elements of a design.

Your eye is drawn to the Tufa formation rising from the lake, and then bounces down to the bush.

Landing page tip: Test using an impactful and contrasting photo as your hero shot, and mirror the palette choice and contrast levels on your CTA to draw a parallel and guide the visitor from the emotional element to the conversion goal.

4. THE SUGGESTIVE POWER OF THE EYE

As humans we’re all programmed to understand the purpose and use of eyes, and the meaning that comes with a stare/glance/look from the eyes of someone or something else.

Here the monkey’s eyes and tilted head force you to stare at the Banana

You can’t help but look down from the head of this Coyote

A subtle suggestion to follow the gaze of the Elk to the flock of birds

Imagine walking down a city street. There is a single person standing looking directly up in the air. Our innate curiosity requires that we follow their gaze to see what’s happening. Turn this into a crowd of people looking in a certain direction and we behave like sheep or lemmings, blindly (?) following the implied or perceived importance of the actions of others.

In the first example, the Capuchin is looking at the Banana as if were a hand in a game of cards.Curiosity is the motivation that forces you to follow his gaze.

With eye movement comes head movement. In this shot, you are not only curious about what could be in the grass, but you are forced to look downwards with the Coyote.

You’d want your conversion target to be where he (and everyone else) is looking.

In the 3rd example, the directional cue is much more subtle, but still very clear. Your attention is first driven to the Elk in the bottom-right corner (this would be your primary headline or Unique Selling Proposition).

You then follow his gaze to the left to see what he’s looking at – arriving at the flock of birds flying over the river – which would be your CTA.

Landing page tip: Use photography of people or animals on your landing page and have them stare directly at your CTA with either the angle of their head or their eyes (in a closeup).

5. INTERRUPTION (Surprise)

There’s a reason why banner blindness has helped click through rates plummet over the last few years.

Visual surprise

People have become programmed to know where the advertising is positioned on your website, enabling them to switch off (or put on blinders like a racehorse) to concentrate on the content instead.

To prevent this you need to surprise people.

In the photo shown, the person (me) is so out of place in the photo of a desert slot canyon that it makes you question it’s purpose or reality.

While you don’t necessarily need to have a naked man streaking across the page – you could try something as simple as taking your Call To Action button and rotating it by 30-45 degrees to create an unexpected design shape.

6. ENCAPSULATION

The river frames the central feature and traps your eyes inside

This is a classic technique used to hijack your visitors eyes and create a tunnel vision effect. You can think of it like creating a window on your landing page where your CTA is the view.

In the first example a strong dark line is created by the river which helps to hold your attention in the center of the frame.

The arch forces you to pay attention to the view inside it

In the second example, a circular arch creates a frame for the feature in the distance, preventing your eye from wandering elsewhere in the photo.

Think of the classic James Bond intro sequence where you see him inside a circular design. (Examples here).

Explicit Directional Cues

The previous examples were all very suggestive and implied an interaction with your visitors. If you want to get a bit more instructive and literal, you can try using more explicit directional cues to point and lead the way.

7. ARROWS

Photo credit Missy Shana – MissyShana.com

As directional cues, arrows are about as subtle as a punch in the face – which is why they work so well. With so little time on your page, guiding the user to the checkout is a smart move.

Arrows let you say, “ignore everything else and pay attention to this please”.

The awesome example opposite shows 3 types of cue all at once. The arrow is a directional pointer, the man opposite is then firing you right back to the guy with the arrow using his eyes, and finally the upside-down text acts as an interruption that make you stop and stare (and most likely rotate your head to figure out what it says).

I used an arrow as a directional guide on the 101LandingPageTips.com site to move attention from the main product image and headline, down to the primary conversion area – the lead gen form.

Landing page tip: Call attention to your most important page elements by using strangely placed and angled arrows. Tie a sequence of arrows together to define a path for the visitor to follow, ending at your CTA.

8. PATHWAYS

The road leads your eye directly to the large rock Mesa at the top of the photo. Place your CTA here.

Pathways are representations of real-world wayfinding avenues that trigger our brain into thinking we need to follow them. This example shows a long straight road, leading your eye to the large rock formation at the top of the photo. Roads are so strongly ingrained in our psyche as the path of least resistancethat we naturally gravitate towards them as a transport guide.

Landing page tip: Design converging lines to draw people to your Call To Action. Triangles are the most dynamic of all shapes, and their natural tendency to point make them a special design tool (in the same way that an arrow is a more intricately designed pathway).

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WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

Since the dawn of the Information Age (circa 1970s) and the birth of the modern day Internet (circa 1990s), specialized services like website design, online marketing and computer programming have been in high demand. As companies continue to move their efforts online, the need for web savvy individuals will continue to increase – which is where we step in.

There definitely aren’t any “set in stone” rules about when and why you should hire a web design agency versus a freelance designer, but just like any situation, the choice should depend entirely on your individual project needs and the overall needs of your business.

While some companies prefer to work with larger teams, others may opt for more of a “one on one” approach to meeting their web requirements. To help you decide, we’ll list some of the benefits to hiring a web agency versus a local (or overseas) freelancer.

Extensive Portfolio

A definite plus to hiring an agency over a freelancer is that agencies will typically have a larger portfolio of websites and clients. This can give you a more accurate picture of their design, development and project management capabilities – as well as any high-profile clients they’ve worked with.

Though a freelancer could boast a list of established clients and diverse creative, the odds of them having sufficient experience in a wide range of industries (like finance, real estate, engineering, automotive) is pretty slim.

Project Management

Probably one of the major benefits and deciding factors for hiring a web design agency is project management. Different from working with a freelancer, web agencies often designate an account manager to oversee your entire project from start to finish; including discovery, design, development, and deployment.

If you have the technical know-how, hiring a freelancer may be a good choice as you would have direct contact with the designer, but the management of a project is often what ensures that every requirement is met, both technologically and creatively.

Expertise & Services

While a freelancer can draw from their own personal and professional experience, a web agency often has a plethora of additional services and resources that they can bring to the table should the occasion arise. On the other hand, an agency could be limited due to strict internal process, whereas a freelancer is more likely to “roll with the punches” – once they put their creative ego to the side.

A key difference is when it comes to additional services. Agencies usually employ in-house strategists, SEO analysts, social media managers, copywriters, illustrators and branding experts who are all available to contribute to the success of your website. Though your freelancer may “know someone”, having the talent located in one place is always a bonus.

The Truth

The truth is we’re not in any way discounting the importance or capability of freelance web designers – because many of us started out as freelancers. If you’d like to be more hands-on with your website design, and don’t really have a strict timeline, then hiring a freelancer is the way to go.

But if you’re company that employs more than 10 people, chances are you need a web vendor that has the experience and track record needed to meet your budget and deadline – not to mention keeping the “suits” happy throughout the process.

– – –

WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.

To understand how your online marketing efforts are performing and how you can improve them, you’ll need to regularly track and analyze the metrics from those campaigns. These metrics highlight the areas on your website, blog or in your online marketing program where you’re doing well, what needs additional tweaking and processes that need to be scrapped.

Understanding metrics can help enable you to identify big problems such as poor timing, inconsistent search phrases, incorrect prospect definitions and flawed audiences. Most importantly, it can help avoid wasting time and money due to poorly-executed websites or marketing campaigns.

The tricky part is knowing the different types of metrics and how they affect your business. Here, I’ve assembled a glossary of terms you’ll need to know to successfully track, analyze and improve your online and email marketing campaigns.

Google AdWords Metrics
If you are using Google AdWords — which offers pay-per-click advertising and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads — then you should get familiar with the following terms:

Click thru rate (CTR). This is the percentage of people who clicked on your advertisement. For example, a 5 percent CTR means five out of every 100 people who saw a particular ad clicked on it. An average CTR for e-commerce sites is 1 percent to 3 percent.

Average position. This tells you the placement of your ad in search results. Most retailers find positions three through five have the best results.

Impression share. Want to know how many times your ad displays per number of searches made on a particular search phrase? Then this is the metric you’ll want to check. For instance, if your impression share was 50 percent, that would tell you that your ad was displayed half the time. A strong impression share generally is about 80 percent.

Bounce rate. This tells you the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and went to your landing page, but did not visit a second page. A bounce rate of 30 percent means three out of 10 people clicked on your ad and left after visiting your landing page. The lower your bounce rate the better, but a good rate is 40 percent.

Conversion rate. This tells you the rate at which visitors are converted into buyers. Typically, 1.25 percent is the low end for e-commerce sites.

Email Metrics
For email campaigns, many of the metric names are different but track some of the same things. It’s useful to uncover what your industry’s standard numbers are so that you can compare your own success rate. The terms you’ll need to know include:

Opens. This tells you how many recipients opened your email.

Clicks. Check this to know how many recipients clicked on your offers.

Bounces. An email usually gets “bounced” when it’s sent to an incorrect email address. If you’re receiving a high number of bounces then you’ll to verify the emails on your list.

Non responders. This tells you who did not open your email.

Forwards. This notifies you of how many people passed your email along to someone else.

Website and Blog Metrics
You can also track visitor activity on a website, blog or landing page. Google Analytics supplies much of this information at no cost. Some of the metrics it follows are:

Total visits. This is the number of first-time and return visitors to your site. “Unique visits” tracks the number of first-time visitors and “return visits” refers to the number of visitors who return to your site.

Leads. The number of prospects who filled out a form or downloaded an offer.

Popular pages. Want to know which pages are resonating best with your visitors? This tells you which ones get the most visits.

Search engine key phrases. These are the top phrases people used to reach your site or landing page.

Geographic locations. This tracks the parts of the country and world your visitors are from.

Referring websites. This refers to other websites — other than search engines — that referred people to your site.

Page rank. A criteria created by Google and one of the determining factors of a web page’s strength in search.

Number of inbound links. These are links from other sites that point to your site or specific pages.

Deciding which of these metrics you wish to analyze will depend on the campaign you are undertaking. Once you determine your methods and metrics, download a sample metrics report and begin analyzing them monthly. This can help you identify how your efforts are improving and where additional effort might be needed.

– – –

WittyCookie is an award-winning digital agency that specializes in affordable web design, graphic design, and SEO solutions to help small businesses grow.

Service plans start at just $19/month, all-inclusive with web design, web hosting, email setup, ongoing maintenance, and unlimited updates. We charge no setup fee, no cancellation fee, and no term contracts with a full money back guarantee.